Amplify Effect Question

[bartjy]

If I use the Amplify Effect, making sure to avoid clipping, will the amplification process produce any type of distortion?

Thanks.

[kozikowski]

<<<will the amplification process produce any type of distortion? >>>

No. Effect > Amplify has to be intentionally adjusted to create clipping or over driving damage. The default setting, as I recall is to make the loudest single peak in the performance be 0 -- just before clipping.

Amplify and Normalize are cousins of each other. Normalize affects each side of the performance, left and right, individually. Amplify takes the whole performance as one piece.

Many people try these two tools expecting compression or other show processing. Both tools make everything louder by the same amount. If the loudest part of the show is twice as loud as the quietest, it will still be twice as loud afterward.

Koz

[steve]

The default setting, as I recall is to make the loudest single peak in the performance be 0 -- just before clipping.

or just at the point of clipping, depending on which way you look at it.

One note of caution is that encoding into a compressed format such as MP3 can output at a slightly higher peak level than the un-encoded audio, so if there are a lot of points that touch 0 dB there can be a bit of clipping after the conversion. For the final mix, if you want to be sure that there is no clipping, then the final mixed track should be normalized (or amplified) to a little under 0 dB ( -0.1 dB is usually enough, but you can go down to -1 dB without any appreciable drop in volume.)

If you do the processing at 16 bit, there can be a noticeable loss in sound quality through repeated up/down amplification (though usually an extremely small loss in quality unless you are doing loads of processing). Using 32 bit tracks in Audacity is recommended (and the default) for highest quality as processing (such as Amplify and Normalize) will be virtually perfect no matter how often you amplify.

[bartjy]

To be clear, you're saying that If I use the Amplify Effect once at 16-bit, there won't be any loss in the sound quality? Correct?

[steve]

So long as you don't go over 0dB, that's correct (and it is deliberately made difficult to amplify above 0 dB)

[bartjy]

Thanks.